Ishmael Reed - Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media - The Return of the Nigger Breakers

“The Republicans are trying to intimidate banks that have stepped up to help stop the foreclosure crisis,” said ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis. “These same Republicans ignored ACORN’s warnings about predatory lending and the foreclosure crisis, then gave Wall Street free rein and are now obstructing efforts to help families.” You can’t make this stuff up, the stuff that Republicans make up. In this land of white supremacists make believe, where Ayn Rand, the crank addict, is a goddess and Sarah Palin is the Moose Queen, fifty percent of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the election for Obama!

Yet, while I was sitting in the airport watching a newswoman dressed like a hooker by the sinister men who pay her bills, I wasn’t feeling as cranky as sometimes. As a matter of fact, I was optimistic for once. During the previous two weeks, I had just witnessed two young people, one of whom is my daughter, demonstrate that books and theater — the arts — are still effective means by which those who are excluded from the airwaves can respond to those who monopolize the airwaves and who wish to distract from the excesses and greed of their class by pitting group against group and race against race and parading people like Michael Vick, Chris Brown, Whitney Houston and O.J. before the cameras, your old Puritan ducking stools with lenses.

While the news media define blacks with a series of hoaxes and stunts, their representations of Muslims are reminiscent of the early nineteenth-century Barbary Pirates days.

So where does one find the point of view of those who are being discussed? How do they view themselves? Blacks, Latinos and others don’t have a Fairness Doctrine that would enable them to counter the 24/7 demagoguery aimed at raising anger (ratings) against their groups and even hate crimes.

Playwright Wajahat Ali, a Pakistani-American playwright, with his play The Domestic Crusaders , offered audiences at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe a view of a Pakistani Muslim American family that challenges those by a media that portray Muslim men as terrorists and Muslim women as courtesans. One could witness the joy and relief of members of the South East Asian audience grown weary of such portrayals. They are attending sold-out performances and rewarding the playwright, director, Carla Blank, the actors and crew with standing ovations. With a tiny budget of no more than thirty thousand dollars we got to view South Asian life not from a hack television and/or Hollywood script writer or an interlocutor like David Mamet but from a brilliant writer whose play The Domestic Crusaders scores a direct hit on not only on the stereotypes accorded to Muslims by the media, but challenges the points of view of those tokens chosen to interpret Muslim life for “the mainstream.” Fareed Zakaria (who encouraged the Bush administration to attack Iraq) might be an expert on the Middle East for the men who own the media, but when some lines from the play described him as such, this audience made up mostly of young intellectual Southeast Asians, laughed. The play drew standing-room-only crowds and received standing ovations wherever it was performed on the West Coast. The same thing is happening at The Nuyorican where the play ran through October 11. Was the play’s appeal limited to an ethnic audience? Not hardly. Actress Vinnie Burrows the great African-American diva loved it. She said that it reminded her of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, one of the dramas that inspired Ali, along with O’Neill’s play about an Irish-American family, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night as well as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . Two black men, one of whom saw the play in the West and a Nuyorican audience member said that the family on the stage could be their families. The play was produced by two African Americans, Rome Neal and myself, directed by a Jewish American, Carla Blank, and performed at the landmark Puerto Rican theater. In addition, two members of American literature’s royal families are part of a crew filming the production for a forthcoming documentary. The documentary producer is Ford Morrison, Toni’s son, and James Baldwin’s nephew, Tejan Karefa-Smart, is operating First Camera. The director is a young black woman named Taneisha Berg. Watching these young people, South East Asian, Hispanic, black and a young white scenic artist, Rusty Zimmerman, collaborate on this project was refreshing. In the 1960s, Manhattan was black and white. The black artists and intellectuals weren’t speaking to whites and the whites were always scrambling around to include a token black on their guest lists.

During her book tour of the East, Tennessee Reed did not reach the thousands that Wajahat reached with his challenge to age-old myths about Muslims, ones not only encouraged by the media but by academia. The play was covered by Al Jazeera, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Today Show and The Wall Street Journal . (The only dissenter was The Village Voic e’s neo-con critic, Alexis Soloski, who objected to lines that criticized the Bush Administration.) CounterPunch contributor, Wajahat Ali, has been at it longer and the effort he made to get his play done east of the Rockies took a lot of energy and resources. He doesn’t sleep and while writing plays he has to support himself part time as a lawyer.

Nevertheless Tennessee’s East Coast bookstore appearances drew a lot of fans and one bookstore appearance was broadcast at a later date by C-Span. Those who showed up for her readings were startled by Tennessee’s inside look at how learning-disabled and black students are treated by American education. For example, I noticed some jaw dropping among some jaded New Yorkers when Tennessee recounted how the Oakland public school system and the University of California at Berkeley introduce students to African civilization by using Tarzan movies and how Reconstruction is taught from the point-of-view of Gone With The Wind . Heads also turned when she reported that some white teachers and professors award white students higher grades than blacks and Hispanics even though the quality of their work might be the same, or, in the case of whites, inferior to that of blacks and Hispanics. They seemed startled by stories about how some teachers humiliate learning-disabled students in front of their classmates. This information comes on the heels of a report that learning disabled are those who are most likely to receive punishment in the nation’s schools. Cuban, Puerto Rican and Peruvian-American students accorded her enthusiastic applause at Miami Dade College when it was reported that when she ran for Oakland school board she was the only candidate who insisted that black and Hispanic students receive the same treatment as those white students living in the affluent areas of Oakland. As a result of her visit to Miami she was invited to the Miami Book Fair and in October, she returned to New York to address The Girls’ Club and students at Brooklyn’s Boricua College. Her appearance prompted this poignant response from a young listener. Though her composition skills are flawed, her sentiment originates in the heart, and her paying attention to a young writer who shares her background and experience demonstrates once again that young people are inspired by such literature, which is still ignored, by the education establishment except for one or two tokens. The establishment’s idea of education is to convert students to the ways of the white man. Zoe’s letter:

Howdy, this is Zoe coming to you from Girl’s Club. Today was really cool, as always. Yesterday Reene said that an author was coming to the club to talk about her book. I honestly didn’t care to attend and listen to a writer because I’m not much a reader. Actually I rarely read for fun. I tend to read only if it’s for school. But surprisingly I had a really good time and now this experience has changed my perspective on a lot of things. so who’s this author that blessed me with her presence? Tennessee Reed is her name and she is the author of her intriguing book entitled Spell Alburquerque: Memoir of a “Difficult” Student. While discussing her work of art, Ms. Reed was so lay back and relexed and it felt as if i was just talking to my friend. So what makes Ms. Reed and her book so special? Well at an early age she was diagnosed with serval language-based learning disorders. Thus one would believe that the odds are against her. how can an individual with so many disorders write an interesting book? Ms. Reed stated “it took a lot of support.” Her mother, Carla Blank, and her father and publisher, Ishmael Reed, were Ms. Reed’s rock. Like any caring parents, “they did their homework” as Ms. Reed likes to say, about to how care and support their comely child. School was difficult for Ms. Reed nevertheless she made it through gradschool and even fought an educational system that often defined her disabilities as “laziness or stupidity”. with all the negative things in her life, she still did what she loves to do. this leaves me with my final words: if you put your heart and mind to it, despite all odds, you can do ANYTHING. signing off”